Can Turkey remain immune from the crisis?
Plenty of scope for M&A
MATTEO FERRAZZI, A banking analyst at UniCredit, keeps receiving emails asking him the same question. "People want to know why Turkey is doing relatively well in the midst of this international banking crisis," he says. "A few years ago, Turkish banks would have been in real trouble."
At the most senior levels in government and in the banking sector, talking heads are quietly predicting that the country’s financial sector might emerge relatively unscathed from the turmoil in international financial markets. Turkey, they argue, has already been ‘vaccinated’ by tough government reforms made in the wake of Turkey’s catastrophic banking failure of 2001. Bankers now hope they will be immune to a repeated banking sector collapse.
At the Turkish finance ministry, deputy undersecretary Isa Coskun says the government learned much from the last...
